Page 2 of April-June 1999 Newsletter

      This side of India kills all hope and breeds new generations of despair and ugliness. This side of India assaults your senses and makes your soul cry out "too much, too much!" This oppression assassinates the morals, insults the mind, clouds the senses, and wounds the heart so that the beauty of India cannot be appreciated.
      In this country where a cow can be a god, the livestock are everywhere. Water buffalo and cattle compete with traffic in the middle of the city. Herds of goats and sheep crowd roads in the country. Every hut has goats, sheep, water buffalo, oxen, chicken, and an occasional pig staked outside.
      Yet in the abundance there is starvation. The villagers and their beasts of burden toil hard for little food. Skeletal children with dim sunken eyes and potbellies sit silently at their mother's weary feet. Stunted calves otter from malnutrition next to their bony mothers. Everything eats the garbage and ends another day with too little hope and too little sustenance as they fill their stomachs with twigs and stems.

Graduates receive their own sewing machines
Graduates receive their own sewing machines
Students proudly display their sewing

      Female infants are aborted, killed in infancy, and children are sold into prostitution. Under the exotic beauty lies a desperate horror, the stench of death and purposeful disfigurement.
      The women are a contrast just like India. They are mysteriously beautiful and graceful. As soon as she matures, she is wrapped like precious gift, surrounded by diaphanous, luxurious, brightly colored cloth. Her jewelry makes sensuous gentle music as she softly walks into the room. Even when she works in hard labor, she serenely carries her load on her head and a babe on her hip. Yet these women are under the suppression of an ancient dowry system that subjects them to beatings, torture, and wife burnings.

      Our many thanks to Lee Ann Berglund-Fosdick for her fine article. She is a veterinarian who resides in Minnesota.

Students proudly display their sewing.
 



Take me to "A Woman´s Voice" home page


Valid HTML 4.0!